From our team's perspective, required elements of our solution included SWaP-C (size, weight, power, and cost) constraints on hardware, as well as software requirements for integration. Our network infrastructure had to be available in sufficient form factor options to permit deployment on aerial robots and various sizes of ground robot. Further, the cost per node was limited to approximately $1k, with an emphasis on cheaper hardware. From the software perspective, the communication system had to support a ROS1 (simplified as ROS) [1]} environment running on Linux; we needed to support ROS natively to reduce needed integration efforts and enable testing of higher-level functions in simulation.
